Chapter 16 - Part 505

An All-American Movement

Charles Euchner captures the moment when white America began to understand the justice of civil rights

By Clay Risen | July 25, 2011

July 25, 2011 Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, which he delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the 1963 March on Washington, is widely considered among the greatest speeches in American history and a high point of the civil-rights movement. But its deserved fame has long obscured the hundreds of thousands of people who also participated in the march: black teenagers from Alabama, white ministers from Kansas, celebrities from Hollywood, and activists from Harlem, all of them gathered in a peaceful demonstration for equal rights unlike anything ever seen in America. In Nobody Turn Me Around: A People’s History of the 1963 March on Washington, newly out in paperback, Charles Euchner, a Chattanooga native and graduate of Vanderbilt University, has written the story of that day from the perspective of these important, if anonymous, participants in the march. Chapter 16 recently spoke with him by phone.

Hidden Costs

In Silver Sparrow, Tayari Jones explores the burden of secrecy

By Susannah Felts | July 22, 2011

July 22, 2011 In Silver Sparrow, the third novel from Tayari Jones, a girl named Dana Lynn Yarboro grows up a captive to her parents’ secrets: her father, James Witherspoon, who is married to her mother, has another wife and daughter. From an early age, Dana learns what it means to be an “outside child,” forbidden to tell anyone of her real father. But over time her desire to know her sister, and her desire to be known, gets the best of her, and she begins to pick away at the thin membrane of secrecy that keeps the girls apart. Set in the 1980s, Silver Sparrow is a thoughtful story about bigamy, but it is also a lovely, realistic portrait of two teenage African-American girls, and an exploration of the bonds between mothers and daughters. Tayari Jones will appear at the 2011 Southern Festival of Books, held October 14-16 in Nashville.

Reconsidering Scarlett

Thanks to the seventy-fifth anniversary of Gone With the Wind, Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone is back in the news

By Margaret Renkl | July 22, 2011

July 22, 2011 In the opening of Margaret Mitchell’s novel, Gone With the Wind, Gerald O’Hara makes an observation his daughter Scarlett never forgets: “Land is the only thing in the world that amounts to anything, for t’is the only thing in this world that lasts.” He might have noted that certain pernicious myths have staying power, too. Not least among them, of course, is the notion of a noble Lost Cause that lurks behind the Confederate nostalgia of Gone With the Wind itself.

Seeing Sparks

Minton Sparks brings to life the South of strained relations and small-town sirens

By Sarah Norris | July 21, 2011

July 21, 2011 Fresh from sold-out shows in New York City and an unprecedented award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, Minton Sparks continues to pursue a literary art form she invented from scratch. Now this genre-defying performance poet, songwriter, and novelist—whose fans and collaborators include Dorothy Allison, Marshall Chapman, and John Prine—is back home in Nashville, but already she’s got her eye on Broadway.

The Uses for Freedom

Robert Cheatham remembers his friend Reynolds Price—and their one public conversation about sex

By Robert Cheatham | July 20, 2011

July 20, 2011 Acclaimed novelist Reynolds Price died on January 20, 2011. Six months later, Robert Cheatham, president of Humanities Tennessee, recalls his former college professor and friend of nearly fifty years and introduces Chapter 16’s publication of an interview he conducted with Price in the 1991 issue of Touchstone magazine. Owing in part to the controversy surrounding a National Endowment for the Arts grant to photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, their conversation—titled “Censorship, Literature, & Public Education”—focused on the issues of sex and censorship and the role of the artist in contemporary culture.

Twofer

Debut Memphis novelist Courtney Miller Santo snags a two-book deal

By Margaret Renkl | July 20, 2011

July 20, 2011 It’s hard enough for an unpublished writer to sell one literary novel in this publishing climate; to sell two must feel a little like winning the lottery. Courtney Miller Santo, a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Memphis now knows the feeling: William Morrow has bought her debut novel, Roots of the Olive Tree, along with her next book, “for six figures,” according to Publisher’s Weekly.

Tender Headed (National Poetry Series)

By Olatunde Osinaike
Akashic Books
80 pages
17.95

“In Tender Headed, Olatunde Osinaike asks the question, what makes a man, and what makes a man like me? As he interrogates the inner and outer workings of masculinity in all its sharp and tender parts, and the way a Black man meets the world, his poems strut and duck and weave across their pages. These poems unpack the ingredients of being and make a meal of language.”

~ Camille Rankine, author of Incorrect Merciful Impulses